The Majesty of God Among Us
9th Sunday after Trinity / Pentecost
1 Corinthians 3:9-17; Matthew 14:22-34
When Jesus Christ performed the miracle of feeding five thousand people with five loaves and two fish,
"And when He had sent the multitudes away, He went up on the mountain by Himself to pray. Now when evening came, He was alone there." (Matthew 14:23)
Jesus was both man and God. He was in public prayer, at prayer meetings in the temple, preached, taught the Gospel of Truth, performed miracles, healed, and cured; but as a man, He also needed to be alone and pray privately.
Just as sleep and food are necessary for the renewal of a person's physical strength, so prayer is necessary for the renewal of their spiritual strength through connection with God the Creator. That is why, outside of public, church services, everyone needs private prayer. A person needs to express both gratitude and heavy burdens, pain, desires, and doubts that torment them before their Creator, along with requests.
We are tempted by the ungodly:
- There may be hundreds of millions of people in the world who pray, so how can God hear us all?
If we imagine God as a person with our mind, our hearing, our sight, in general, as a Being with our capabilities, then such a God cannot hear us. He also cannot see us, nor can He react, act - influence the requests of all those millions of people.
But such a God cannot exist. The pagans, the ancient Greeks and Romans, and, obviously, our ancestors imagined gods like this. Such a God, with human capabilities and abilities, could not have created a human being whose body is more complex and immeasurably more perfect than any machine or apparatus created by humans.
In our age, we are proud of atomic engines, electronic devices, and automatons, but we do not pay attention to the fact that the entire human organism is a peculiar and most perfected automaton. Automatically, without any intervention from us, our heart beats about 10 thousand times a day, 3 million 700 thousand times a year. Those who have lived over 70 years have had their hearts beat about 260 million times...
And that "pump" - the heart - has been working without lubrication, without repair, without care for decades... But automatically, in coordination with the heart, our lungs work -- they supply oxygen to the blood, neither more nor less, but only as much as necessary. Automatically, for 70-80-90 or 100 years, in interaction with other organs of our body, our kidneys, stomach, all digestive organs, various glands work...
We see with our eyes, perceive through our ears, various information, and somewhere all this is automatically recorded in our memory. The power of the recordings is stored in our memory, and later, if necessary, we recall and reproduce all this.
They say: "It's all in the brain..." Yes, but all of this does not depend on humans, it was not humans who designed it, it was not humans who put it into action, it was not humans who controlled it. We just don't know how brain atoms create thought, thinking...
But it is not only our body, it is everything created on earth. All the planets, all the stars, and their continuous movement in space. And one does not interfere with the other. All machines and automatons created by humans are attempts to imitate God's creations. So, for example, airplanes were conceived in imitation of birds. If there were no flying creatures, it is unlikely that man would have considered it possible to create a flying machine.
We doubt that an ant could comprehend the greatness of a human being, even if it were to look at him. It can never comprehend how a person could build a building with a hundred floors, build airplanes that fly around the earth, build rockets that reach the moon and various planets.
An ant cannot comprehend this, but in comparison with the Creator of the world, with God, we are obviously smaller ants. His Omnipotence, perfection, omnipresence, His ability to respond to our prayers, His immense and unknowable mind are limitless. Therefore, one cannot doubt God's ability to respond to and accept the prayers of millions of His creatures, because He is the Creator of all and they exist and act by His will.
We must understand our dependence on God's will and find time for private prayer alone. Private prayer, whether in word or thought, can be done every day, at any hour, in any weather, in any place. And it is in the sense of private prayer that Christ said:
"When you pray, go into a room, close the door, and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father, who sees in secret, will give it to you openly." (Mt. 6:6)
The Gospels testify that: Christ prayed before beginning His gospel sermon (Mark 1:35); before choosing His closest disciples, He stayed all night in prayer (Luke 6:12); He prayed before performing His miracles (Mt. 14:19; John 11:41); He prayed before His suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mt. 26:39-41). He prayed, hanging on the cross, for Himself, for His disciples, for His crucifiers - "for they do not know what they are doing." (Mt. 27:46; Lk. 23:34,46)
The Lord promised that if we ask sincerely, having forgiven our debtors, the Almighty God will grant us mercy and give us what we ask for:
"Ask, and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you; for everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened." (Mt. 7:7-8)
God took residence in man so that the God-Man would teach by his own example, by prayerful example, that we should always turn to God: when we start a good deed, and when we have completed it, to thank God (in Christ's case, He miraculously fed the people), and when we need consolation in our grief, when life’s stormy waves overwhelm us.
The Lord saved both Peter and His disciples during the storm on the Sea of Galilee, and He rebuked Peter for his lack of faith:
"O you of little faith, why did you doubt?" (Mt. 14:31).
Today's Gospel story symbolically teaches us that in the midst of the stormy waves of the sea of life, we must rely on the Lord with great faith.
However, if we remember that God exists only when we call on Him in times when we are overwhelmed by the turbulent waves of life, when we are in grief, serious illness, danger, or some kind of misfortune, then we are affirming that without grief and misfortune we do not want to know, remember, or turn to our Creator and Guardian.
Therefore, what conclusion can we draw?
We bring upon ourselves then all sorts of infirmities and misfortunes....
Amen.
Very Rev. Fr. Taras Slavchenko
Taras Slavchenko was born on March 8, 1918 in Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk region in Ukraine. After graduating from school and the Pedagogical College, he entered the language and literature faculty of the Scientific Pedagogical Institute. Having successfully completed it in 1938, he served as a teacher in a secondary school.
